Blatter considers World Cup changes

In an interview with the German weekly magazine Focus for their next edition coming out on Monday FIFA president Sepp Blatter has said that certain changes could be applied to group stage matches in FIFA World Cup's to make it more entertaining and attractive. And those changes surely sound interesting, but once more they don't have anything to do with technology.

Mr. Blatter had made some suggestions for changes about six years back, but those ideas were not excepted by FIFA's governing body. The last real changes came with the implementation of the golden goal rule and then making it fairer with the silver goal rule, which was later scrapped altogether after only being in existence for the 1998 FIFA World Cup in France on the global stage. And the only championship to be decided by golden goal was the 1996 European Championship finals at London's Wembley Stadium when Germany beat the Czech Republic 2-1 through an Oliver Bierhoff golden goal.

Now Mr. Blatter is considering of proposing certain changes like abolishing draws in preliminary group stage matches in World Cup's. His suggestion is to have direct penalty shootouts to decide a winner or adding a sudden-death overtime. This the FIFA president thinks could force teams to take a more pro-active approach in the 90 minutes in the group stages then a rather wait and watch approach, which often bored fans around the world in the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

I personally feel it is an interesting idea! And it should be tried and tested at Youth World Cup's and if found fit could be implemented at senior level. It could help avoid too many of those boring goalless draws and if the winners are given two points and the loser one, then it could open up the whole group equations. But now one will have to wait and see if Mr. Blatter just mentioned these changes in an interview or if he seriously would pursue these changes for the good of the game. Also one would have to see what other FIFA members and the footballers themselves say.